Miami Marlins Brazenly Insert Selves into NL East Debates

I’m sure you, like I, was one of the countless legions who saw the Jonathan Papelbon deal, turned to their seatmate on the subway, and yelled “Why don’t they just give us the World Series trophy now?!”  This was obviously followed by several minutes of intense winking and elbowing.

But the Miami Marlins, with their new clothes and their new house and all their shiny, plastic, garish new stuff, seem like they’ve hatched their own little plan and intend to not only play in the NL East; they want to win it.

Now, if you’re an NL East fan, then you know the formula by now.  The Braves are the historical masters, but the Phillies have all but usurped them in recent years, with an abrasive smattering of Mets somewhere in there once or twice.  The Nationals are terrible.  And fairly new.

But the Marlins are a traditional third place spot-filler, there because somebody has to finish between first and last.  Except for those times when they won the Wild Card and then the World Series twice since 1993.  Which gave them as many rings as other certain teams who’ve been around for 100+ years.

Ha, ha!  The truth is so, so stupid.

Anyways, I appear to be talking about the Marlins for some reason, and it’s mainly due to their freakish upstartedness that has everybody rattling away on their keyboards reporting the same news for all infinity:  The Fish want Pujols.  And they want him for a decade.

They’ve become the second of two teams Pujols is probably headed for, along with the team he currently plays for.  That… hasn’t been the case.  Ever, it feels like.  Once in a while, a sinister low market team will sneak into negotiations in the first or second step of a major play, but for the most part, these superstar wheelings tend to include only certain parties.

But that’s what makes all this so unnerving.  The Marlins have already signed Jose Reyes for six years and Heath Bell for some other amount of years.  They are hurling briefcases of money at people, but there are so many bills packed into them that nobody cares if they get concussed by a briefcase.

Whether the Marlins are a little trigger happy from all the novelty newness of their franchise is yet to be seen.  Maybe these are just the new Marlins–aggressive, intrusive, all up in your shit.  Unlike real marlins, which avoid human confrontation at all costs.  But I’ve been told that teams often have nothing in common with their namesake, and that drawing comparisons like that serves no purpose.

Point is, last season the Nationals signed Jayson Werth and it was a big huge thing that almost ended the internet.  That team is on the rise, but it seems they’ve settled into a slow boil, rather than the explosive spew of money the Marlins are ready to dish out.

Should we, a former titan with an aging core, be concerned about the freshness and youngness of our divisional counterparts?

Oh god, yes.  Are you not just mortified, all the time?  How can you not be?